As I won’t have any time for this in October, I declare it as finished now.
Enjoy.

It’s the story about a cat, who is hunting a mouse. The mouse turns out to be braver than the cat, and in the end the cat is the hunted one.

I’m aware that there are still a lot of errors there, especially the sky, and objects intersecting each other. However it was my first 3d animation ever, and my first project in Blender, so I’m happy with the result. I learned a lot, and that’s the most important thing for me.

THANKS
to the Blender community, without whom I would never be able to learn that program so fast
to the people who gave me advices and pointed me the right way with the animation, who helped me out with reference material and who gave me critics.
to Circus Marcus who allowed me to use his music
and to Tom who was patient when I animated mouse instead of taking care of him.

Video on CGTalk: Play Video >>
quicktime: www.ania.xibo.at/img/kot.MOV
or www.ania.xibo.at/img/kot12.mov

Does the Video work for you? For me it seems jumpy and the sound is strange, but it was alright when I played the .flv on my computer.
Did I do something wrong with the upload? I used the challengeuploader.jar

I’m adding a link to a .mov version. Quality is about the same, it’s just for the case the above animation doesn’t work.
www.ania.xibo.at/img/kot12.mov

Hey Anna, nice movie! I liked a lot your movie, especially mood, achieved by tender colours and black/white freehand texturing (be it intentional, or not ).
And animation is very good, nice movements and micro-movements. Especially I am proud because it done in Blender :).
Crtits: some samll technical issues - the ears of cat are not smoothed, and there is some z-battle in the floor mesh shadows (The blender problem which is probably caused because you didnt subsurfed some polygons - i have often these issues too (grr…) )
Best luck!

Wow!!! I really loved the animation. I was instantly attracted on the first shot, lovely use of texture and warm light. You managed to capture a graphic feel as if it were done by hand (traditional media) but with that controlled sense of 3D. This is great work. As you stated, there are some errors, but those can always be ironed out later. On a whole the piece comes across solidly. I hope you enjoy refining this to the point you want it… it’s really worth the time. Congrats on this great submit ania. :buttrock:

Hiun - I will not refine this further, because I won’t have time till the contest’s deadline because of exams. But I’m already planning a next animation where I will not make the same errors again.

Npantic - thanks for the tip with subsurfing the floor, I was wondering why there are those problems.

Melkao - Blender is very confusing at the beginning (I worked in Max before), but after the first shock you learn how to work in it very efficiently, and in my opinion many things are solved better than in Max. User interface is better, once you get used to it. Unwrap is much better, also skinning, and there’s a node-based material editor and video editing is possible too. Only big disadvantage that there’s no Vray for Blender.
It has a bit different workflow as far as big scenes are concerned, in Max I used X-Refs for that, here it’s solved differently and I needed some time to find out.

there are some tutorials on different private homepages and on smaller blender forums too, often it’s the best to search in google if you want something specific.
the blender community is also very helpful, I think they are happy about each new user

Nice job Anna ! I particulary like the render !
Learning Blender at the same time, great challenge ! I am planning to go to Blender too ! A friend of mine gave me great tips to start, so I think I will go on soon !
Great challenege again Anna !

Well done. I like the style of your animation. Sorry for not being with you from the beginning. I think you did a great job rogging and animating your characters. Good job with textures and lighs. Music works well. The only thing that I would tweak if I were you is the cat sound. I know that it is difficult to find it. Try looking at http://freesound.iua.upf.edu. You can find there a lot of free sound effects. There should be a cat too.